Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel laureate in literature, who was often called the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, died on Friday in Dublin. He was 74.

His publisher, Faber & Faber, announced the death. The Irish poet Paul Muldoon, a longtime friend, said that Mr. Heaney was hospitalized after a fall on Thursday. Mr. Heaney had suffered a stroke in 2006.

In an address, President Michael D. Higgins of Ireland, himself a poet, praised Mr. Heaney’s “contribution to the republics of letters, conscience and humanity.” Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister, said that Mr. Heaney’s death had brought “great sorrow to Ireland, to language and to literature.”

A Roman Catholic native of Northern Ireland, Mr. Heaney was renowned for work that powerfully evoked the beauty and blood that together have come to define the modern Irish condition. The author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, as well as critical essays and works for the stage, he repeatedly explored the strife and uncertainties that have afflicted his homeland, while managing simultaneously to steer clear of polemic.

Mr. Heaney (pronounced HEE-nee), who had made his home in Dublin since the 1970s, was known to a wide public for the profuse white hair and stentorian voice that befit his calling. He held lectureships at some of the world’s foremost universities, including Harvard, where, starting in the 1980s, he taught regularly for many years; Oxford; and the University of California, Berkeley.

As the trade magazine Publishers Weekly observed in 1995, Mr. Heaney “has an aura, if not a star power, shared by few contemporary poets, emanating as much from his leonine features and unpompous sense of civic responsibility as from the immediate accessibility of his lines.”

Throughout his work, Mr. Heaney was consumed with morality. In his hands, a peat bog is not merely an emblematic feature of the Irish landscape; it is also a spiritual quagmire, evoking the deep ethical conundrums that have long pervaded the place.

“Yeats, despite being quite well known, despite his public role, actually didn’t have anything like the celebrity or, frankly, the ability to touch the people in the way that Seamus did,” Mr. Muldoon, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the poetry editor at The New Yorker, said in an interview on Friday. “It was almost like he was indistinguishable from the country. He was like a rock star who also happened to be a poet.”

Mr. Heaney was enraptured, as he once put it, by “words as bearers of history and mystery.” His poetry, which had an epiphanic quality, was suffused with references to pre-Christian myth — Celtic, of course, but also that of ancient Greece. His style, linguistically dazzling, was nonetheless lacking in the obscurity that can attend poetic pyrotechnics.

At its best, Mr. Heaney’s work had both a meditative lyricism and an airy velocity. His lines could embody a dark, marshy melancholy, but as often as not they also communicated the wild onrushing joy of being alive.

The result — work that was finely wrought yet notably straightforward — made Mr. Heaney one of the most widely read poets in the world.

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The Irish poet Seamus Heaney in 1995, the year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.Credit
Steve Pyke/Getty Images

Reviewing Mr. Heaney’s collection “North” in The New York Review of Books in 1976, the Irish poet Richard Murphy wrote: “His original power, which even the sternest critics bow to with respect, is that he can give you the feeling as you read his poems that you are actually doing what they describe. His words not only mean what they say, they sound like their meaning.”

Though Mr. Heaney’s poems often have pastoral settings, dewy rural romanticism is notably absent: instead, he depicts country life in all its harsh daily reality. His poem “A Drink of Water” opens this way:

She came every morning to draw water

Like an old bat staggering up the field:

The pump’s whooping cough, the bucket’s clatter

And slow diminuendo as it filled,

Announced her. I recall

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Mr. Heaney, who traveled and lectured widely, at the University of Bologna in 2012 at a celebration of the centenary of the author Giovanni Pascoli.Credit
Mario Carlini - Iguana Press/Getty Images

Her grey apron, the pocked white enamel

Of the brimming bucket, and the treble

Creak of her voice like the pump’s handle.

Mr. Heaney was deeply self-identified as Irish, and much of his work overtly concerned the Troubles, as the long, violent sectarian conflict in late-20th-century Northern Ireland is known.

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But though he condemned British dominion in his homeland (he wrote: “Be advised, my passport’s green/No glass of ours was ever raised/To toast the Queen”), Mr. Heaney refused to disown British tradition — and especially British literature — altogether.

The writers who influenced him deeply, he said, included not only the Irishmen William Butler Yeats and James Joyce but also the Englishman Thomas Hardy.

In his poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” whose title became a byword in Northern Ireland for the linguistic subterfuge that underpins biographical conversations, Mr. Heaney wrote:

As a result of Mr. Heaney’s inclusive stance, some supporters of the Irish Republican cause condemned him as accommodationist. His rejoinder can be found, for instance, in lines from his 1974 essay on the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who was exiled to Siberia by Stalin’s regime and died there in 1938.

In the essay, Mr. Heaney set forth an observation that could be applied with equal force to contemporary Ireland:

“We live here in critical times ourselves, when the idea of poetry as an art is in danger of being overshadowed by a quest for poetry as a diagram of political attitudes,” he wrote. “Some commentators have all the fussy literalism of an official from the ministry of truth.”

The eldest of nine children of a cattle dealer, Seamus Justin Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, at Mossbawn, his family’s farm in County Derry, west of Belfast. The farm’s name would appear throughout his work. Mr. Heaney’s intoxication with language, he said in a 1974 lecture, “Feeling into Words,” “began very early when my mother used to recite lists of affixes and suffixes, and Latin roots, with their English meanings, rhymes that formed part of her schooling in the early part of the century.”

Later in the lecture, he ventured an alternative scenario: “Maybe it was stirred by the beautiful sprung rhythms of the old BBC weather forecast: Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Shetland, Faroes, Finisterre; or with the gorgeous and inane phraseology of the catechism; or with the litany of the Blessed Virgin that was part of the enforced poetry in our household: Tower of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven, Morning Star, Health of the Sick, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted.”

In 1961, Mr. Heaney earned a bachelor’s degree with first class honors in English language and literature from Queen’s University of Belfast. He wrote poetry as a student, publishing under the modest pseudonym Incertus, the Latin word for “doubtful.”

He went on to earn a teaching certificate in English from St. Joseph’s College in Belfast and was later appointed to the faculty there. He began writing poetry seriously in the mid-1960s, joining a workshop led by the noted Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon.

Mr. Heaney followed “Death of a Naturalist” with collections including “Door Into the Dark” (1969), “Wintering Out” (1972), “Station Island” (1984) and “The Midnight Verdict,” published in 1993.

In 1995, he became the fourth Irishman to win the Nobel in literature, following Yeats, who received it in 1923; George Bernard Shaw (1925); and Samuel Beckett (1969).

In awarding the prize to Mr. Heaney, the Swedish Academy cited his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past” and also commended his cleareyed analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict.

Though Mr. Heaney was lauded throughout his career, a few critics condemned his work as facile.

“If Heaney really is the best we can do, then the whole troubled, exploratory thrust of modern poetry has been a diversion from the right true way,” the poet and critic Al Alvarez (also known as A. Alvarez) said in The New York Review of Books in 1980, reviewing Mr. Heaney’s collection “Field Work.” Mr. Alvarez continued:

“Eliot and his contemporaries, Lowell and his, Plath and hers had it all wrong: to try to make clearings of sense and discipline and style in the untamed, unfenced darkness was to mistake morbidity for inspiration.”

Mr. Heaney’s survivors include his wife, the former Marie Devlin, whom he married in 1965; two sons, Christopher and Michael; and a daughter, Catherine, The Associated Press reported.

His other writings include critical essays on Yeats, Joyce, Joseph Brodsky, Ted Hughes, Stevie Smith and Italo Calvino; “Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001” (2002); and a verse translation of “Beowulf” published in 2000.

In “The Cure at Troy,” his 1991 verse adaptation of Sophocles’ play “Philoctetes,” about the Trojan War, Mr. Heaney wrote these evocative lines:

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

In April, Vice President Joseph R. Biden, citing Mr. Heaney as “one of my favorite poets,” quoted those lines at the memorial service for Sean Collier, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer killed in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.

In a 1991 interview with the British newsmagazine The Economist, Mr. Heaney described his essential professional mandate.

“The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world,” he said. “It means being vigilant in the public realm. But you can go further still and say that poetry tries to help you to be a truer, purer, wholer being.”

Correction: August 30, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the prime minister of Ireland. Enda Kenny, the prime minister, is a man. The earlier version also misstated the name of the institution from which Mr. Heaney received a bachelor’s degree. It is Queen’s University of Belfast, not Queen’s College.

Correction: September 6, 2013

An obituary on Saturday about the poet Seamus Heaney omitted a reporting credit. James C. McKinley Jr. contributed reporting.

James C. McKinley Jr. contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 31, 2013, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013; He Wove Irish Strife and Soil Into Silken Verse. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe